DIY Market Research to Identify Opportunities for Your Limo Business
Market research is the “why” to your overall business plan. It’s the process you undergo when determining the reasons clients will purchase your services - especially over your competitors’ services.
If you haven’t conducted market research recently, or ever, the activity can help you identify opportunities for your limo business within the marketplace. Although the term “market research” implies time-consuming measures and the assistance of third-party companies, you can actually do it to a certain degree in-house.
When you own a business, it’s best to avoid making most decisions on intuition. Laying a foundation of growth on solid evidence and proven analytics will deliver long-term, sustainable growth for your operation instead of short-term surges in revenue.
Market research is beneficial whether you are just starting your limo business or if you’ve been around for decades. If you are a startup, market research can uncover your competitive advantage within the industry and market. Conversely, if you are an established company with a popular brand, market research is more useful for selecting new service options and targeting clients more effectively and efficiently.
Most companies use market research to…
- Determine competitive pricing for their services
- Promote their services in the most attractive way to target clients
- Create new or expanded service offerings within the market
- Analyze their competitors’ methods and services
- Obtain a larger scope on the trends and current environment of their industry
- Assess their brand’s reputation among potential clients
- Test new services and marketing positioning
- Overcome business risks
So, where do you start your DIY market research? Here’s a 3-step guide to gathering the information you need to discover opportunities for business growth.
- Choose the goal of your market research
Where do you stand in the market? What do consumers think of your company and brand?
How are your unique value propositions performing? Are there new service offerings or different markets you could permeate?
Did you recently increase your pricing structure and need to analyze the client response to the measure?
These are all perfectly reasonable goals to guide your market research strategy. Once you settle on an objective, you’ll know exactly what kind of answers you need to get and the questions you should ask to receive them.
Depending on your goal, the questions you select might surround topics ranging from market demand and client demographics to pricing restructure and competitive landscape.
- Strategize your research methodology
The first characteristic of conducting market research you must understand is that there are two buckets of information you can glean from your efforts. These include primary research and secondary research.
- Primary Research: This is information you retrieve from your own business and includes items like client feedback, historical sales data, and website and social media analytics. You’ll likely use surveys, interviews, and focus groups to conduct primary research. Don’t rule out the value of basic observation - the general response chauffeurs get from clients, the types of individuals who comment on your social posts, and more.
- Secondary Research: Most people start with secondary research because it is easily accessible and quicker to gather compared to the primary research avenue. You’ll compile information from the internet like existing market research on your subject matter, details from your client database, and reports from government and industry bodies.
Make sure that any information dissected from secondary research is current and as relevant as possible to your objective and your business.
Try using the following resources as a starting point for your secondary market research:
- Build a marketing plan
After you finish the research process, you will have all of the information, data, and analytics you need to create a robust marketing plan. Now, marketing plans are certainly in-depth, but you can use the insight you gleaned from your market research to fill out all sections of your plan and develop action plans to implement immediately.
A standard marketing plan will include 10 vital pieces:
- Executive Summary
- Company Overview
- Current Market Situation
- Competitive Situation
- Macro Situational Analysis
- SWOT Analysis
- Issues Analysis
- Market Segmentation
- Marketing Strategy
- Action Plans
Have any questions? Throw them into the exclusive Facebook Group or email us at [email protected].